CORROSIVE SUBLIMATION: ART & AB-SENSE
A Seminar Facilitated by Dylan Lackey
About Dylan Lackey
Dylan Lackey (they/them) is a US-based instructor and PhD candidate in Virginia Commonwealth University's transdisciplinary Media, Art, and Text program. Their research addresses the space between Lacanian psychoanalysis, Black insurgent philosophy, and contemporary queer and trans art theory. Currently, Dylan is working on their dissertation which considers the post-war German artist Anselm Kiefer's 2023 visual adaptation of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake and the effects of encountering this exhibition alongside new readings of Lacan’s 23rd Seminar. Their existing writing can be found in TOPIA, Culture and Dialogue, Critical Humanities, InVisible Culture, and elsewhere.
About the seminar
This seminar will serve as an introduction to psychoanalysis’ various encounters with art and creative life since the late 19th and early 20th century ‘discovery’ of the unconscious by Sigmund Freud. Weaving an anachronistic path between James Joyce, Leonardo da Vinci, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Claude Cahun, and Pedro Almodovar—and before concluding with a consideration of the overlooked aesthetic philosophy of Frantz Fanon elaborated in recent work by Rizvana Bradley, Patrice Douglass, and David S. Marriott—we will grapple with the limits of a psychoanalytic aesthetics, especially emphasizing the Freudian conceptualization of ‘sublimation’ and the complex late Lacanian idea of ‘le sinthome.’ At the core of both ideas—sublimation and sinthome—lies a concern over the (non-)place of excess, ab-sense, formlessness, and jouissance in the schema of representation, and both concepts have evoked vastly different interpretations with regard to the role of the radical artist within or without civil society (whether as genius, outcast, zealot, critic, criminal, or something else altogether). This seminar will ask: how is ‘The Artist’ seen according to psychoanalysis, and to what extent is The Artist’s (might we say, after Lee Edelman: queer?) unconscious savoir-y-faire (know-how-with) the disavowed inheritance of transatlantic slavery and Black violability? Can a Black art ‘of the unbearable’ (in Marriott’s Fanonian terms) be located anywhere on the path between creative sublimation and the Joycean sinthome, or is Blackness, as what is not [n’est pas], nothing more than that path’s effaced form(lessness)?
Because this seminar was conceptualized while researching and writing two recent articles: “Joyce’s Masochistic Lalangue” (Culture and Dialogue, 2025) and “Anselm Kiefer’s Finnegans Wake and the Whiteness of Lalangue” (unpublished), these pieces will serve as general scaffolding and are recommended reading. Rather than being a seminar ‘about’ these articles or about my research practice, however, I envision these six meetings as a way of 1. building our collective understanding of the (for better or worse) massively important post-Seminar XX work of Jacques Lacan (especially his potentially problematic transformation, through sexual difference, of Freud’s sporadic writing on creative sublimation into the quasi-feminine figure of the creative sinthome), and 2. forcing a brief encounter with the unbearable Black aporias that arise—and which are immediately effaced or transmuted to whiter ends—whereever artmaking, non/representation, and unconscious truth overlap in the afterlife of slavery.
Session Dates
First Session: January 31st
Part 1 of Second Session: February 28th
Part 2 of Second Session: March 6th
Third Session: March 14th
Fourth Session: March 28th
Fifth Session: April 25th
Sixth Session: May 16th
Goals for Engagement
Participants are encouraged to attend as many of the sessions as possible, engage with the material outlined in the syllabus, and partake in the discussion!
All sessions are free! Attendance is not mandatory, but we recommend attending regularly to get the most out of the material.
All sessions will be held virtually! If you have any accessibility requests, please contact us at info@msresearchcenter.com, and we will do our best to accommodate.
To access the readings (PDFs) and session meeting links, please click the enroll button at the top of the page! We will send our first introductory email on January 10th, including links to the readings for the first session.
Syllabus
Session I: A Psychoanalytic Introduction to the Artist
Session II: Use of Symptoms
Session III: Masochism Beyond Sublimation
- Luke Thurston, Introduction, Prologue, & Conclusion in Understanding Sublimation
- Sigmund Freud, “The Economic Problem of Masochism”
- Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, “Two Contracts of von Sacher-Masoch” in Masochism: Coldness & Cruelty
- Gilles Deleuze, sections VIII–XI in Masochism
Session IV: Ab-sens, Lalangue, Pas-Tout: Art and
(Self-)Ruin
SPECIAL GUESTS: FRED MOTEN & ERIC ALLIEZ
Session V: Queer Desublimation and Trans* Anarchitecture
SPECIAL GUESTS: LEE EDELMAN & JACK HALBERSTAM
- Pedro Almodovar, Bad Education (2004) — CW: sexual abuse of children; depictions of/references to addiction and substance use
- Lee Edelman, Preface, Introduction, & Chapter 1 in Bad Education
- Jack Halberstam, Introduction in Anarchitecture After Everything
Session VI: Black Art, N’est Pas
SPECIAL GUESTS: DAVID S. MARRIOTT & RIZVANA BRADLEY
- Lee Edelman, “Ce n’est pas ça: Blackness, Sex, and the Set of Illegibles”
- Rizvana Bradley, Chapter 1 & Chapter 4 in Anteaesthetics
- Patrice Douglass, Introduction, Chapter 1, & Conclusion in Engendering Blackness
- David Marriott, “Corpus Exanime”
- David Marriott, “Three Forms of Poetic Exaltation” + “...From Origin to End”
- Donald Rodney, Autoicon